2 Make Plea Deals on Espionage Charges

The two most important spies caught since the arrest of Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames in 1994 have agreed to plead guilty to conducting espionage for Moscow, sparing the FBI and the CIA the embarrassment of having traitors from both agencies on trial at almost the same time.

On Friday, former FBI counterintelligence agent Earl Pitts, 43, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court here to selling secrets to the Soviet Union and later to Russia, beginning in 1987. Pitts, who was arrested in December after an extensive sting operation by FBI agents posing as his new Russian handlers, is only the second FBI agent ever to face espionage charges.

Meanwhile, Harold J. Nicholson, 46, a former CIA station chief and the agency’s highest ranking officer ever to be arrested for espionage, is scheduled to appear Monday in the same federal courthouse to plead guilty to charges that he spied for Russia from 1994 until his arrest in November. U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey refused to provide details of Nicholson’s plea agreement with the government.

In his plea bargain with federal prosecutors, Pitts pleaded guilty to two of the 12 espionage-related counts on which he had been charged--conspiring to commit espionage and attempted espionage.

Federal prosecutors said at a news conference that they agreed to cut a deal with Pitts, apparently sparing him from spending the rest of his life in prison, only after FBI investigators found that they could not prove Pitts had passed top-secret information to intelligence agents of either the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Bellows said that the FBI only had evidence that Pitts had given Moscow information that was classified as secret--even though he had access to top-secret documents--thus calling for more-lenient punishment under federal sentencing guidelines.

Fahey stressed that the government has not reached an agreement on a specific sentence with Pitts, who has agreed to a complete debriefing with the FBI on his espionage before he is sentenced. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis scheduled Pitts’ sentencing for June 20.

In pleading guilty to conspiracy, Pitts said: “I provided information I believed to be classified to persons I believed to be agents of the U.S.S.R. and later to persons I believed to be agents of the Russian Federation.”

Pitts was an FBI counterintelligence agent trailing Soviet diplomats at the United Nations in New York when he decided to sell out to Moscow in July 1987. He wrote a letter to a Soviet diplomat at the United Nations who the FBI thought at the time was a KGB official, revealing how he was under surveillance by the FBI and offering to meet. The diplomat quickly turned Pitts over to Aleksandr Karpov, a real KGB officer, who became Pitts’ handler.

Among the most sensitive information he provided Moscow was information on an FBI “asset,” or Russian spy, in New York, as well as a copy of the FBI’s “Soviet Administrative List.” That list is the bureau’s computer compilation of all Soviet officials assigned to the United States and which FBI agents are assigned to monitor their activities. For his treason, Pitts received at least $129,000 from Moscow, and the Russians told him that they had set aside another $100,000 for him in a “reserve account.”

Prosecutors also revealed Friday that Pitts’ espionage activities were more extensive and longer lasting than had been indicated earlier. The government said that, after Pitts was promoted to supervisor and transferred out of counterintelligence in 1989, he continued to act as a highly productive spy for Moscow.

From his new post in Washington, Pitts made at least nine trips to New York to meet his Russian handlers between 1990 and 1992, passing film and computer disks first to the KGB and then to the SVRR, the Russian successor intelligence agency.

The FBI was able to prove that Pitts remained an active spy in part by recovering from his portable computer a lengthy February 1990 message to his Russian handler. In the message, Pitts told the Russians that he was using a portable rather than a desktop computer because he thought it would be impossible for investigators to retrieve the message.

After Pitts finally was transferred to a nonsensitive post, the Russians seemed to lose interest in him and he became a “dormant” spy. His spying was uncovered when the Soviet diplomat he had first contacted at the United Nations defected to the United States. The FBI began a sting operation against him in August 1995. The former Soviet diplomat went to Pitts’ home to convince him that Moscow wanted to renew their relationship. The defector led him to undercover FBI agents conducting a “false-flag” operation.

Pitts denied one widely reported aspect of his case during his court appearance Friday. He admitted that he had lied when he had told undercover FBI agents posing as Russian spies that he had an emergency escape plan prepared in case of discovery. He told the judge, “I had no escape plan, even though I communicated that.”

Nicholson, the CIA’s former station chief in Romania and later its deputy station chief in Malaysia, began to spy for the Russians in the summer of 1994, just before he left Malaysia to return to the United States to become an instructor at the CIA’s secret training facility, called “The Farm.”

The government believes that among other secrets, Nicholson turned over to Moscow the identities of the CIA officers he was helping to train, making it easier for the Russians to track CIA officers around the world.

Pitts and Nicholson are the most significant Russian spies apprehended since career CIA officer Ames was arrested in 1994. Ames, widely considered the most damaging Russian spy ever caught, spied for Moscow for nine years. His treason led to the deaths of as many as 10 Russian spies working for the United States.